Signature Stats – Measure Success and Be Accountable

September 2, 2009 · Filed Under Eco-Driving, FuelClinic, FuelClinic.com

Last year I learned several lessons from John Wood who wrote “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World“, an inspiring story of a successful Microsoft executive who left his cushy job when he found his passion helping children in impoverished countries with the books and schoolhouses by starting a global non-profit called “Room to Read“.

One of Mr. Wood’s early ideas was to include in all email correspondence a signature that included the current state and progress of his work. In his case, at the bottom of each and every email he sent out he would include how many schools had been built, how many libraries established, how many book have been donated, and how many scholarships awarded. Between himself and his staff, he figures they sent out roughly 300 emails per day – 300 opportunities to show what they had, or had not yet done.

After reading that section of the book I decided that this was a natural thing to do with FuelClinic – since it’s a site dedicated to measuring members success, we should publicly announce the success or failure of the system as a whole, and be accountable to the people we hope to influence to try or invest in FuelClinic. So I added near real-time stats (cached every 15 minutes or so) to the homepage of FuelClinic, and have added daily stats to my email signature file. Here is today’s signature file:

Michael Bragg
Founder and CTO
FuelClinic.com (www.fuelclinic.com)
Fuelishness! Blog (blog.fuelclinic.com)

———————————————-
FuelClinic.com | First Aid for High Gas Prices
———————————————-
“We have over 2,100 members who have tracked
4.05 million miles of driving, and improving
fuel mileage an average of 6.32%”
———————————————-
Our member’s stats:
———————————————-
$33,061 dollars saved
11,152 fewer gallons of gas consumed
216,348 fewer lbs of CO2 emissions

Personally, I’m not really that excited about the improvement in fuel mileage being 6.32% on average. My goal is to push that number up near 15%, but considering that FuelClinic is still missing the planned “eco-driving training courses”, it’s kind of impressive that simply getting educated about actual fuel cost and it’s impact – and being involved enough to keep receipts and plug them into this website – equals a better-than 6% improvement in efficiency. (And this isn’t 6% better than the EPA estimates, this is 6% better than when they started tracking mileage.)

I believe in accountability, and I believe this method of announcing success (or lack of) to both new and old contacts alike. If you’ve got a business you are struggling to start-up — find ways to indicate your progress, find something you can measure with certainty and start assigning a number or percentage to it, and then re-write your email signature file to include these metrics. Update it daily.